8 Must Have Tools when Going to the Client’s Site

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Have you ever been to a client’s site and you are in the middle of a large deployment and something goes wrong. Of course not! yeah ..sure Don’t you wish then you had packed with you the source code code, X or Y tool to help you better diagnose the issue and save you from either a trip back to the office to debug the issue or having to delay the release a couple of days.

I had a few of those and so now I have my Swiss Army Knife of tools that I always have with me just in case.

1. My “Deployment Laptop”

I have an entire development environment setup on a laptop that I use when I go home or when I am at the client’s site.it has IIS, VS 2008 with TFS, SQL Server, SQL Reporting Services and SQL Integration Services.

2. SysInternals tools

I can’t remember the last time I used these, but they did save my butt so many times trying to debug some weird behaviors. You can get them here.

3. The latest version of the source code

We normally have the releases all packaged but Just before I go or the night before I would do a get latest from TFS to my laptop.

4. A backup of the development databases

I have a SQL Script that would create a backup of our development databases that I always take with me. Even though during our development cycle we always have patch scripts for all the changes we do - which works fine most of the time – sometimes things don’t go as smoothly as planned so being able to load a dev database and do a quick compare can be a life saver.

5. RSScripter

We use SQL Server Reporting Services for several clients and they create new reports and modify existing ones and of course they don’t know who has the latest version. RSScripter let’s me download the .rdl files from the server that I can then modify and redeploy to the server.

6. A Custom Diag tool

I wrote a custom Diagnosis tool that checks the connection to the database server, authorization stores, AD etc….Great for quickly detecting minor issues. (Network cable damaged, DNS issues, user rights…)

7. A Copy of the Clients app.config and Web.config files

I always keep a different copy for deployment. I got burned so many time by forgetting to change a config setting.

8. Oh…An extra sweater in case you are going in the servers room

Not really a tool but useful if you don’t wanna wake up with a sore throat the next day.

What else would you add to this list? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Hope this helps!

Hatim